Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity

185 Pages·2008·1.65 MB·English

by  Karl F. Zender

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Zender explores the difficulties Shakespeare’s experienced, and insightful scholar/teacher can write late in a e
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characters face as they transfer power and career. Karl Zender’s emphasis on ‘generativity’ allows him to
authority to their children and others in the offer surprisingly fresh readings of a number of Shakespeare’s
next generation. Paying careful attention to plays that are themselves the product of a thoughtful dramatist’s karl f. zender
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the plays’ moral and ethical implications, he personal and professional maturity. The psychological observa-
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demonstrates how Shakespeare’s innovative tions Zender makes about these dramas extend into the world of a The life expectancy in Shakespearean times
depiction of the midlife experience focuses on their time as well as to our own postmodern situation.” k averaged only about twenty-five to thirty-five
internal psychological understanding rather e Shakepeare, years, but those who survived the illnesses of
— Arthur Marotti, author of Religious Ideology and p
than external actions such as ceremony and infancy and childhood could look forward to
Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses
ritual. e a long life with nearly the same level of con-
in Early Modern England a
Illuminating and engaging, Shakespeare, r fidence as someone living now. But even so
Midlife, and Generativity offers a fresh analy- e long ago, some faced conflicts in their middle
, Midlife, and
sis of several of Shakespeare’s most important “Through a characterological approach to drama (which seems M and later years that remain familiar today. In
plays and explores a profound, centuries- to be returning to favor), and a psychologically verisimilar ap- Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity, Karl F.
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old perspective on the challenges inherent in proach to character (driven by a carefully hedged Eriksonian- d Zender explores William Shakespeare’s de-
middle age. ism), Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity illuminates Shake- l pictions of middle age by examining the re-
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speare’s lessons about aging without reducing the plays to those f lationships between middle-aged parents—
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karl f. zender is a professor of English lessons. The observations about doctors and confessors are com- , mainly fathers—and their children in five of

at the University of California at Davis. He pelling, and the diagnosis of Macbeth as a creature disastrously a his greatest plays. He finds that the middle-
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is author of The Crossing of the Ways: William obsessed with a perfected future—as if that were immortality aged characters in King Lear, Macbeth, Antony
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Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World and rather than its opposite—is important and convincing. The argu- and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tem-
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Faulkner and the Politics of Reading. ment that performativity replaces soliloquy in Antony and Cleo- pest—much like their modern counterparts—
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patra produces one of the best discussions of that play I have yet experience a fear of aging and debility.
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encountered. . . . Through it all, Karl Zender’s personal voice in- Representations of middle age occur through-
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tervenes in measured ways—effectively, modestly, refreshingly, r out the Shakespearean canon, in forms rang-
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and sometimes quite movingly.” ing from Jaques’ “seven ages” speech in As You
t
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— Robert Watson, author of Shakespeare and the H azards v Like It to the emphasis— almost an obsession—
i in many plays on relations between the genera-
of Ambition t
y tions. Lear, Zender shows, tries to forestall the
approach of old age with a fantasy of literal re-
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Drawing on Erik Erikson’s theory of gener-
Shakespeare,
Midlife, and
Generativity

Shakespeare,
Midlife, and
Generativity
Karl F. Zender
louisiana State University Press
Baton rouge
Published by louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2008 by louisiana State University Press
all rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of america
First printing
designer: laura roubique Gleason
Typeface: Tribute
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Zender, Karl F., 1937–
Shakespeare, midlife, and generativity / Karl F. Zender.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBn 978-0-8071-3355-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Shake-
speare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpreta-
tion. I. Title.
Pr2965.Z46 2008
822.3'3—dc22
2008004136
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for perma-
nence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book longevity of the Council on library
resources. ∞
To My Students

This form, this face, this life
living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken.
— T. S. Eliot, “Marina”
nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.
— William Faulkner to his daughter

Contents
acknowledgments xi
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Chapter 2. lear’s age 15
Chapter 3. The river of Blood 38
Chapter 4. Cleopatra’s Children 59
Chapter 5. Hermione’s Wrinkles 87
epilogue: Prospero’s anger 115
notes 123
Bibliography 151
Index 165